RFID Accelerates Penetration in the Fresh Food Sector, Enabling a Leap from "Cold Chain" to "Smart Chain"

For a long time, numerous factors in the fresh food sector—such as liquid absorption, metal reflection, and low-temperature condensation—have constituted a "death zone", making large-scale application of RFID technology difficult. However, this year, Walmart and its partners developed a cold chain RFID solution that has increased the recognition accuracy of freezers to 99% and stabilized the reading distance at over 3 meters, completely breaking through technical barriers. This breakthrough not only triggers an efficiency revolution in the fresh food industry but also signals that RFID technology will become a core force in reconstructing the fresh food industry chain.

Multiple market drivers are propelling the accelerated penetration of RFID in the fresh food sector. From the perspective of industry pain points, the global annual fresh food loss rate exceeds 15%, with the annual waste scale in the Chinese market reaching hundreds of billions of yuan. RFID can reduce the fresh food loss rate by more than 60%—Walmart’s pilot stores saw their loss rate drop from 8.3% to 3.1%, with a single store cutting losses by over 1.2 million US dollars annually. At the policy level, China’s "14th Five-Year Plan" includes strategic deployment for the Internet of Things (IoT), coupled with requirements for the construction of food traceability systems, providing institutional guarantees for technology implementation. On the consumer side, more than 80% of consumers are willing to pay a premium for traceable fresh food. The full-process temperature-controlled data generated by RFID serves as a quality endorsement, with one high-end supermarket seeing a 35% increase in average customer spending after launching RFID-enabled traceability.

Huge market potential is gradually being unleashed. Data shows that China’s RFID market has an annual compound growth rate (CAGR) of over 15%, and the overall scale is expected to exceed 60 billion yuan by 2030, with the retail and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) segment growing at a rate of over 18%. In the fresh food retail scenario alone, the global market requires more than 5 billion new cold chain-specific tags each year, with the market scale exceeding 3 billion US dollars. As the cost of tags is projected to drop below 0.1 US dollars by 2025, RFID will expand from high-end fresh food to ordinary categories, forming an application pattern covering all product lines.

In the future, with the integration of RFID with AI and digital twin technologies, the fresh food industry will realize a leap from "Cold Chain" to "Smart Chain". Haikang Bori (Haikang Borui) will leverage its full-industry-chain advantages: on the technical front, its independently developed intelligent temperature-sensing chips enable a leap from "identification" to "perception", capable of monitoring parameters such as humidity and vibration in addition to temperature, perfectly adapting to all scenarios of fresh food storage and transportation. Tailored anti-metal and anti-liquid tags, designed for the characteristics of fresh food scenarios, maintain high recognition rates in complex environments such as freezers and refrigerated trucks. As technological breakthroughs deeply align with industrial demands, RFID will undoubtedly become a core engine for the high-quality development of the fresh food industry, and Haikang Bori’s full-chain empowerment capabilities will continue to create greater value for the industry.